Sunday, April 5, 2009

Lei's questions

(1)/(2)Schiller said that “American national power no longer is an exclusive determinant of cultural domination…the domination that exists today, though still bearing a marked American imprint, is better understood as transnational corporate cultural domination.” Was he saying that economy plays a more important role than politics today? In addition, if American cultural domination is reflected by consumerism cultural domination, I am suspecting the difference between American cultural domination and corporate cultural domination.

By the same token, when Schiller later speculated on globalism, he said “…the generalized interest of some thousands of super-companies is not that different…‘reasoning in nationalist terms does not make sense any more’” But I am also wondering to what extent American culture influenced the formation and operation of these super-companies.

(3) Grahams differentiated capitalism and corporatism. “There is significant qualitative difference in how capitalists and corporatists organize their worlds. Capitalists form an owning class, and its political power comes from ownership; corporatists are a controlling class, and their political power comes from controlling public discourse.” It seems that capitalism is related with a certain political system while corporatism is kind of independent of it. Can we say that we use “corporatism” in a more economic sense comparatively? Are most political economists misusing “capitalism” in this regard?

(4)Meehan had an unexpected finding in which a structural contradiction exists between “patriarchy and capitalism embodied in a fundamental market in the television industry, and effecting the structure of two derivative market.” And he indicated “despite the ratings monopolist’s adoption of categories to sort viewers by occupational status, women remained marginalized as niches.” I wonder if the finding applies to today’s media situations. It seems to me that television industry target women consumers to a great extent.

(5) The last filter in Herman and Chomsky’s analysis is “anticommunism as a control mechanism”. Can I say the filter still works as the biggest ideology that underlies U.S media reporting of China?